Buried Dreams (16 page)

“He said, ‘Because I am.’ “

Carol “took it as a joke. I really didn’t believe it.”

Bisexual. Wasn’t that something you studied in sophomore biology, like with earthworms?

John was intelligent, industrious, charming. Carol thought he was “just talking” about being bisexual. He certainly didn’t act like a homosexual. In fact, he seemed to despise flagrant gays.

John Gacy, Carol saw, was manly, tough in his business,
but not so
macho
he couldn’t cry. The first time Carol saw him lose control was on Christmas Day 1971. John just let himself go, and he cried on Carol’s shoulder, telling her that he couldn’t stand the idea that he had let his dad down “because he did not make the funeral when his dad died. He was in Iowa at the time and they wouldn’t let him come to the funeral.” John said “it bothered him that he wasn’t able to attend and see his father for the last time.”

Carol recalled that every year she knew him, John would go out to Maryhill Cemetery, in Niles, and visit his father’s grave during the Christmas holidays. Every year he’d come home upset. The first year, Christmas 1971, was the worst one. John just couldn’t stop crying. He was totally out of control.

Just over a week later, John Gacy killed the first of his thirty-three victims.

*Name changed.

CHAPTER 10

PATHOLOGISTS CLOSELY EXAMINED WHAT
remained of each of the thirty-three victims attributed to John Wayne Gacy. All of the bodies, according to Dr. Robert J. Stein, Cook County’s chief medical examiner and one of the country’s foremost forensic pathologists, could be described as “markedly decomposed, putrefied, skeletalized human remains.” Ten of the bodies were in such a state of decomposition that no certain cause of death could be determined. Six of the bodies were recovered with ropes dangling from the spinal column in the region of the neck. Others, more recent and less skeletalized, were found with wads of cloth stuffed far back
into the throat. All this is consistent with Gacy’s pretrial statements, explanations, and “rationalizations.”

He said the boys “killed themselves” with the rope. At other times, in the early statements, Gacy said “Jack” must have strangled them with the rope. He said he could only guess at this because that is the way “John” found them in the morning. He found them where they lay, found them dead, with ropes wrapped tightly around their necks. He could only “rationalize” as to the cause of death. He said that if he did, in fact, commit the murders, then he might have stuffed rags down their throats to prevent the leakage of certain fluids when he moved them. Gacy didn’t know this for sure, but it was a good rationalization.

The conclusions reached by Dr. Stein’s team were consistent with John Gacy’s statements. All the victims could well have died of strangulation or suffocation. There is only a single inconsistent instance: One victim was certainly stabbed to death.

The body was never identified, but since it was the ninth one recovered from the boneyard under John Wayne Gacy’s house, the victim was named for the order in which his body was exhumed. Dr. Stein personally examined body number nine. He was dealing, for the most part, with bones.

Dr. Stein, along with a radiologist and an anthropologist, found that the fifth rib “had an incised area on the upper portion compatible with a stab wound. Also the left lateral or side aspect of the sternum had two areas which were also compatible with an incised or stab wound.” Within a “reasonable degree of medical and scientific certainty,” Dr. Stein concluded that the individual referred to as body number nine died from “stab wound, multiple, of the chest.”

The boy known as body number nine died in an entirely different, but no less horrifying, manner than the other thirty-two known victims. This was a fact of special and intense interest to many of the psychiatrists and psychologists who studied John Wayne Gacy. Why did this boy die differently? Was there a special significance in this one stabbing? The doctors studied Gacy just as the pathologists studied the remains he had left behind. Body number nine became known as “the Greyhound bus boy.” He was the first one whom John Wayne Gacy killed.

Everyone wanted to hear about the first murder. The
psychiatrists, the psychologists, they were all interested in the first time, as if some special knowledge to be gleaned there would explain everything. The puzzle merchants were so goddamn interested in the first one it was almost funny. You could see them working it over, this first murder, trying to get down to the marrow of it, like a dog with a bone.

They were after the “why” of it, and the sense of their questions was this: If we can understand the first one, then it will explain all the others, every one; if we can only dig to the root of this one, then we should be able to see a pattern, see the entire dark flower whole. They seemed to think that all the rest of the murders grew from this first one and that once they grasped it, grasped the full meaning of it, the dark flower would unfold as flowers do in time-lapse photography. The first was the pattern, the genesis of the murders to follow.

This was absurd. John didn’t know why they wanted to concentrate on the first one and on the last one. Both of them didn’t fit the pattern. They were anomalies. He told them so. The first one was self-defense. Anybody who knew the facts would have to agree. Anyone, confronted in his bedroom by a man with a knife, would have done the same thing. Why couldn’t they see that the first one didn’t fit?

John told the story over and over. He told it the same way every time: clear and detailed right up to the episode with the knife. Then the story got hazy around the edges. It rippled and broke until the final ghastly scenes were wispy and without substance.

He always told them that he wasn’t particularly depressed, though it happened just after New Year’s Day 1972, and the doctors reminded John that the Christmas holidays had been a bad, unsteady time for him ever since that Christmas Day in 1969, when his father died without a son by his side to comfort him.

Sometimes, on Christmas Day, John would go out to the cemetery on the North Side of Chicago to stand by his father’s grave. He said that those were times he had to talk to his father, but John’s words burned inside his throat, and the graveside monologue became emotional, cathartic. His ex-wife Carol saw him sobbing helplessly by his father’s grave on one of these holiday visits.

But no, John wasn’t particularly depressed during the Christmas holidays of 1971. Out of prison, he was strong
now, building a new life, working to became a new man, working to become successful. He had some things he needed to prove to the memory of his father. He wasn’t depressed at all.

No matter that his Aunt Pearl, his father’s sister, had died on New Year’s Eve just as 1971 became 1972. The psychiatrists and psychologists could go ahead and assume that he was down. It always amused John that the doctors knew what he was thinking or feeling at any given time. He’d tell them one thing, and they’d go right ahead and figure the exact opposite.

So it was Christmas 1971, then his aunt died on New Year’s Day, and the doctors insisted on seeing some sinister emotional pattern. John told his story often enough; and no matter what his father thought, John wasn’t dumb and stupid. He watched the doctors as intently as they watched him. And he knew what these doctors thought: They figured that the Christmas holidays preyed on his mind, that they reminded him of his culpability in his father’s death. John could see it quite plainly: The doctors thought that all that Christmas music, all the cheer and laughter, all the parties and toasts to peace on earth conjured up images of death in his mind, visions of shame and retribution, of dark secrets and inevitable punishments.

On New Year’s Eve, as his aunt was dying, John was working a private party at Bruno’s. Carol’s mother took the kids so that Carol could join John at Bruno’s at about eight. John remembered that he paid for the cab. He always remembered little details like that. You could check them out, these little details, and see that John was telling the truth. He had nothing to hide.

John kept working, and he joined in the party when he could. It broke up at about 3:00
A.M.,
and John drove back to the house in Norwood Park where he and Carol fell exhausted into bed. They slept approximately four hours, rising at about eight in the morning. John had to drive Carol to Kennicott, where her mother was staying with the kids.

“I won’t be able to see you for a few days,” John told Carol when he dropped her off. He had just gotten word that his Aunt Pearl had died.

John drove back to his Summerdale house and slept until about 3:00
P.M.
Then he got up and drove to his Uncle Harold’s, where his mother had spent New Year’s. From there they drove to Aunt Ethel’s—a holiday with the family.

John told the doctors that there wasn’t much talk of death that night: Aunt Pearl was on his father’s side, Aunt Ethel was his mother’s sister. It was just another holiday party, the end of a hectic week, and they drank and talked and played cards. Aunt Ethel mixed a stiff Scotch and water. John hadn’t intended to get drunk, but he had worked hard the night before and he was tired and the drinks snuck up on him. It was Aunt Ethel’s fault, really. She was one of those hosts who grabs your glass and fills it right back up again when you’re only half done. Still, it was always a good time at Aunt Ethel’s house. Everyone was talking a mile a minute—John and his mother and Aunt Ethel, all of them motormouths—and you had to watch the drinks. In a way, everything that happened that night and the next morning could be traced to those drinks. Nothing would have happened except that John got drunk. He sure wouldn’t blame Aunt Ethel for what happened to the Greyhound bus boy. It was just the way she kept pouring all those drinks. . . .

The party began to break up at about 12:30
A.M.
John’s mother wouldn’t get in the car with him. They argued briefly, but Ma just wouldn’t drive with anyone who had been drinking. That was one of her rules; she told John that you never could say anything to a drinker. He’d just go and get belligerent and start to holler and that made driving with him doubly dangerous. Ma decided to stay with Aunt Ethel.

That was just another one of those details you could check out. John had no special plans that night. He never thought, This is the night I’ll go out and kill the first one. He wanted to take his mother home. He argued about it in front of Aunt Ethel. If his mother had just driven home with him that night, the Greyhound bus boy might never have died. And maybe, if there hadn’t been a first one, then there might never have been a second, or a third, or a thirty-third. John would never want anyone to think—God forbid—that his mother was to blame for a half-dozen years of killing. It was just one of those things you had to think about, another proof that there was never any premeditation. You could check it out.

John stepped out into the new year and walked to his car. The air was cold, bracing, and the Scotch had done its work on him. He wasn’t tired. He wasn’t thinking about the death of his aunt. He felt inexplicably charged up and thought he’d go out “looking around.”

John started driving, and the car turned toward the downtown area. Maybe he’d just go down to the Civic Center and look at the ice sculptures. Of course, he knew that the Greyhound bus depot was very close to the Civic Center; and he knew from Manny that you could go down there to pick up “chicken hawks.” John never quite got that terminology straight: it was the older men, cruising like sharks in the big cars, who were called chicken hawks. They picked up young men and boys at the bus station. The boys were chicken.

These definitions are not exclusive to the gay community. Cops use them. Straight people used to refer to a defunct burger joint near Clark and Broadway as “chicken delight.” The place was a hangout for young hustlers; and blatant deals were struck with older men, there under the glare of fluorescent lights and amid the smell of frying burgers.

But John never quite got the terms right. He had seen his share of gay pornographic movies, kept gay pornographic magazines in his house; he had picked up hundreds of men and boys—by his own admission—over the years, and yet, even with an IQ tested in the upper 10 percent of the population, he called the boys he picked up “chicken hawks.”

What could the doctors do with that one? You could suppose that he was naïve, that he hated the dark, night-stalking part of his life so much that he refused to think seriously about it or apply the proper definitions to himself. You could assume that he had heard the terms and thoughtlessly applied them to his own case. It was, after all, John Gacy who was the innocent, the chicken. The young hustlers were bent on outsmarting him, on cheating him out of his money, on blackmailing him. They were the chicken hawks.

At one or two o’clock on a cold January morning, after a long, lonely holiday weekend, what excuse did young men have for hanging around the bus station so late on such a frigid night? They weren’t fooling anyone. Everyone knew that you could pick up the young ones there, the unsophisticated boys away from home for the first time. There were also some slightly older guys, hustlers who “got into it for money.”

John knew a little bit about how the sculptures were made. It was “really an art.” You have to hit the ice just right with the chisel, or the whole cake will break or shatter. It was something a professional chef could do and something John wanted to learn, so he went down to the Civic Center, near
the station, to study the technique of ice sculpture at 1:30
A.M.

“I went down to look at the ice sculptures,” John said. “But then, after I seen it, I got back in my car.” There were people walking around, and across from the Civic Center he could see the Greyhound bus depot. “So I drove around the block and pulled up in front of there. That’s when I seen the kid.”

Picking up the kid was a fluke. This first one was an accident.

Up to this point, you could verify every detail of John’s narrative. Carol’s story would be substantially the same as John’s. Records would show the exact time of Aunt Pearl’s death. Ma would remember that she stayed with Aunt Ethel because John had been drinking. A quick call downtown would confirm it all: The ice sculpture exhibit was still standing outside the Civic Center in the early-morning hours of January 2, 1972. Everything John said was the truth. It all checks out.